Flexibility in Organisation

Flexibility in organizationFlexibility is becoming a common world in the present world of work. Organisations find it essential to be flexible and to make its employees have the same mind set because they believe it can create organisational prosperity in terms of profit and competitive advantage. Functional flexibility is the requirement or expectation that workers will perform tasks beyond those strictly specified as their main role of function. This might entail ‘cross-working’ (performing other people’s jobs at the workplace), increasing the number of tasks performed or working in team. Numerical flexibility is about using ‘non-standard’ contracts of employment to match labour supply to product and service demand and to design work in a way that avoids exposure to the risk of ‘over-staffing’. Employers achieve numerical flexibility when employees work part-time, fixed-term, zero hours, annual hours, or from home. It may also entail the use of short-term and/or flexible contracts with ‘outside’ labour (home workers, agency workers, and temporary workers) employed either on an intermittent or longer-term basis, including contracting in and contracting out. This is known as outsourcing. As far as financial flexibility is concerned it is the firm’s ability to adjust employment costs to reflect the state of supply and demand in external labour. Restructuring of value chains not only increases flexibility but also has other aims for instance cost-cutting, closeness to market or customers and access to knowledge. Requirements for flexibility may be passed on along the lines of power and position in the chain. One survey of senior executives at global companies suggests that, on balance, firms want to become even more flexible. Executives believe that the benefits of strategic flexibility in five years’ time will be even greater than they are today. They also welcome greater flexibility, seeing it as a means for them to attain greater job satisfaction. Concerns...

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...employees and employers are benefits from the flexible works and 5 types of flexibility forms (numerical, functional, temporal, locational and financial) are analyzed. The pluralism theory are also used to develop the argument whether these forms are offered to all employees or used as an employer prerogative as new form of control. Recommendations are also provided for a flexible manager, employees and union.
Flexible work option can be known as flextime, compressed work week (48/52, 26/52), ANNUAL HOURS or HOURS AVERAGING, PERMANENT PART-TIME WORK, JOB-SHARING, PHASED AND PARTIAL RETIREMENT, VOLUNTARY REDUCED WORK TIME (V-TIME), WORK-SHARING - STC
(SHORT-TIME COMPENSATION), FLEXIPLACE - from telecommuting, working from home; hot-desking; outsourcing; remote sourcing; home sourcing.
Many employers have already adopted flexible working arrangements because they see them as making good business sense. They can help:
• Retain skilled staff and reduce recruitment costs.
• Raise staff morale and decrease absenteeism.
• Meet labour market changes more effectively.
For employees, the opportunity to work flexibly can help them strike a better balance between their paid work and other responsibilities.
Flexible working arrangements benefit everyone—employers, employees, and their families
5 forms of flexibility:
Numerical Flexibility (Employer)
Numerical Flexibility is where an organisation...

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Assignment Title : With reference to relevant literature, critically discuss the consequences of organisations making subjective judgments in hiring decisions and suggest ways these might be avoided.
With reference to relevant literature, critically discuss the consequences of organisations making subjective judgments in hiring decisions and suggest ways these might be avoided.
Organisational Psychology could be described as a specific field of Psychology, which is looking at human behavior in the work settings. It has two major goals; to conduct research in order to study and understand the human behavior at work, and to apply the findings of this research in order to improve the work environment, psychological well being of the workers, work behavior and, as a result, to enhance an organizational performance.
Frederick W. Taylor (1911) was one of the pioneers that applied the scientific principles to the study of work behavior, and by doing so significantly increased work efficiency and productivity. He argued that each job has a one best method of doing it and in order to identify the most successful way of doing the job, he broke it down on the components, which were possible to measure, and noticed the time, that was required to perform each component. Taylor also looked at the methods of the employee’s selection, where he considered not only the worker’s abilities, but also a selection tools....

...demonstrated, as an aside, during one of the popular TV cooking shows. Soon all the home-cooks are rushing out to buy one. With sales going up, the manufacturer decides to improve the coffee mug. Oops. Unless the manufacturer acknowledges that the purchaser decides the purpose, it will make a better coffee mug, and not a better scone-cutter. Sales will fall because ‘Purpose’ was unclear.
BUT – it’s never as simple as that. Perhaps there are more sales available when the coffee drinkers discover the unique thermal properties that keep coffee hotter on the inside, while the outside remains cool to hold. So in this case, the organisation needs to educate the customer about the purpose of the mug.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter who defines the ‘Purpose’ so long as both sides eventually understand and agree with it. Without alignment between organisation and customer, meaning agreement with the ‘Purpose’, there will be no business transaction.
The following two excerpts have not been edited or altered.
“Knowledge self-organises around organisational purpose. Without a North Star for knowledge, it's impossible to focus on what is needed” (Allee, 1997). 12 principles of knowledge management. Training & Development, 51(11), 71.
Determining the Firm's Purpose or Vision: The task of determining the direction of the firm rests squarely on the CEO's shoulders. Joe Gorman, TRW's CEO, believes that the top manager, often working...

...places. It’s a great result for them. Sainsbury also got big profit for her juices product.
Sainsbury’s first competitor is Tesco and Sainsbury always try to be batter for Tesco. In that rejoin Sainsbury try to improve her product and it’s a big benefiter thing for Sainsbury.
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So, we can say that Sainsbury invention is great like they say it is, and they choose to represent them and them monitoring their results in marketing strategy ways.
Bibliography
Books
1. Principles of Marketing (2006)4th European edition
(PHILP KOTLER, VERONICA WONG, JOHN SAUNDERS, GARY ARMSTRONG)
2. Elements of Marketing (1991)2nd edition
(A.R.Morden)
3. BPP (2007) Business essentials: supporting NC/HND and Foundation degrees. Organisations and behaviour
Journals
Personnel Review (Emerald)
Personnel Today (Reed Business Information)
Online resources
http://www.ehow.com/info_8749189_buyers-behavior-affects- marketing-activities.html
http://uk.ask.com/web?qsrc=1&amp;o=38302770&amp;l=dis&amp;q=what+is+Propose+new+positioning+for+a+selected+product%2Fservice+sainsbury+&amp;dm=all
http://www.ehow.co.uk/info_12259576_marketing-strategies-new-product-launch.html...

...Organizational Behavior
Personality Profile
Joris van Kleinwee
IBA-Group: 9
ANR: 709585
Personality Profile: Joris van Kleinwee Each person is characterized by certain habits, characteristics and features they have inherited or were acquired due to events in their lives. These factors determine the personality profile of a certain person and each different personality will have a certain impact in an organization or more specifically in a group. In this report my own personality profile will be presented by the results of a questionnaire, this questionnaire is a device used to give an indication of the big five factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism which will all together describe my personality profile. These results will be thoroughly compared with context of existing scientific literature which will then determine my own personal profile. Firstly the results of my questionnaire will be discussed by comparing them with the existing personality profiles, followed by an observation of the affects my personality would have in a group. Lastly, I will discuss the key strengths and/or weaknesses of my personality with current literature in this scientific field and will then conclude all observations. The results of the BIG-Five questionnaire were more or less as I expected (geen goede topic sentence aangezien de...

...Flexibility has been defined in different ways by different authors. Adopting an operational view, Nagarur (1992) defines flexibility as “the ability of the system to quickly adjust to any change in relevant factors like product, process, loads and machine failure”. At macro level, Flexibility can be defined as an absorber of environmental uncertainty and variability (Gerwin, 1993; De Toni and Tonchia, 1998; Beach et al, 2000). Research in the area of operational management cites flexibility as a strategic imperative that will enable firms cope up with uncertainty (Gerwin, 1987) and (Sethi and Sethi, 1990).
De Toni and Tonchia (1998) provide two general perspectives on flexibility: flexibility as a filter, and flexibility as a dampener. As a filter, flexibility is an uncertainty absorber, which shields a firm from external disturbances and provides them internal stability in the face of exogenous changes through homeostatic mechanism. Thus, flexibility provides a notion of adoptability with the ability to preserve a degree of integrity and coherence in external volatile environment to the organisations. Further Sanchez (1995) suggested that flexibility is constrained not only by resources but also by the method of the use of the resource as also suggested by the Resource based view (RBV) of the firm. Thus strategic...

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Submitted To:
Peter Butler
Submitted By: Karan Sharma (P13202579)
Word Count: 2576 words
Date: May 7TH, 2014
Flexibility is about an employer and a worker making changes to when, where and how an individual works to meet the business and individual needs. Flexibility empowers both the business and the individual needs to be met through by making changes to location (where), manner (how), time (when) in which the employee works. (Workplaceflexibility.bc.edu, 2014)
As cited in (Wilton, 2013, p99) Conley suggests, ‘flexibility is an amorphous term used to describe many qualitatively different forms of work, and it is sometimes employed as a term holding both positive and negative connotations’.
Flexible working opportunities benefit everyone: employers, employees and their families. Many employers know that it makes good business sense to provide flexible working opportunities for their staff. These employers know flexible working arrangements enable them to retain skilled staff and reduce recruitment costs; to raise their staff morale and decrease absenteeism; and to react to changing market conditions more effectively (DTI). (Butler, 2014)
One key determinant of any organization’s ability to react adequately to a changing and questionable business environment is the flexibility and the adaptability of its workforce. The flexibility of the workers is reflected in the ability of the...

...The term flexible working means Flexible working' is a phrase that describes any working pattern adapted to suit workers needs. Flexibility is the The ability of an organisation to adapt the size, composition, responsiveness and cost of the people inputs required to achieve organisational objectives (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2010). There are different forms of flexibility which are numerical flexibility, functional flexibility, financial flexibility, locational flexibility and temporal flexibility. Numerical flexibility is where employers can change the size of their workforce as their labour requirements change. Functional flexibility is the ability of an organization to move employees to other duties or responsibilities within the company. Locational flexibility is that employees can work from home instead of coming to the office. Types of temporal flexibility are Part time working, home working, job Sharing, term time working, annual Hours Zero hours, 9 day fortnight/compressed hours. The table below shows that “Between 2006 and 2011 there was a general increase across all modes of flexible working (Table 2). Teleworking (TN0910050S) saw the greatest rise, being offered by 14% of employers in 2006 and 59% in 2011. This echoes trends in flexible working observed in the UK as well as the rest of Europe...